Mis-education

Ex-candidates from Kenya's forgotten frontier are on the warpath. The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) cancelled the Form Four examination results of a majority of the schools in Kenya's North Eastern Province. The political leadership of the NEP is united in condemning the decision by the national examinations body to cancel the results of hundreds of students for irregularities, including collusion and cheating. The news media report running battles between the aggrieved former students and the security officers in Garissa and scores of injuries among the angry youth. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education is busily rethinking the 8-4-4 system, proposing a radical overhaul of the system. There are those who support the overhaul whole others, including education experts, are vehemently opposed. A robust debate over the proposed overhaul is currently being held to determine whether it will be accepted or rejected.

We are nowhere near being ranked among global leaders in childhood and adolescent education and the scenes being witnessed from Garissa buttress the fact that regardless of the proposed overhaul, Kenyan students have a long way to go before they can be classified as among the best in the world. In 2010 and 2011 it was apparent that the resources allocated to the public education sector, despite being greater in proportion compared to other public services, were still grossly inadequate. When members of the teaching profession went on strike the last time round, they insisted that the government had to hire more teachers to cope with the massive influx of students since the decision to provide free basic education to Kenya's children was implemented. They also demanded better pay and working conditions; after all, they argued, without the teaching profession, the dreams of Vision 2030 or the development of the nation would remain dreams and nothing more.

The middle classes in Kenya's main towns have been isolated from the realities of public education for a decade or so, ever since they discovered that for a reasonable fee, their children could attend private academies where the teacher-to-student ratio is optimal to the education of their scions. The private schools their children attend have better facilities than most public schools and ensure better all-round development of their children. Public schools on the other hand, in line with the austerity measures being enforced throughout the firmament of government, have continued to suffer diminishing resources and stagnation. Teacher-quality is doubtful at best and facilities have deteriorated to such an extent that it is not unusual to visit a public school where black-boards are no longer black, and children share desks sometime six-to-one. So it is with anger that the parents and ex-students of Kenya's NEP reacted when the KNEC decided to classify many of the candidates as cheats and withheld their marks. In a region where the education of the youth is not high enough on the national agenda, every child that attains a grade sufficient to send him to university is an asset and a resource that is sorely needed, not just for the survival of the family but his clan and his community as a whole.

We have made a fetish of the KCSE and KCPE, holding them above all other means of measuring education in this nation. Without these basic certificates, our children are condemned to lives of penury and hardship. They are then exposed to the harsh realities of a nation in which jobs are apportioned according to the paper qualifications one possesses with the best jobs going to those with the best 'papers' and the rest being relegated to the fringes of the white-collar economy and, very often, the criminal underworld. It is no surprise that even parents are engaged in exercises meant to game the examination system, going so far as to spend vast amounts of their family fortunes to ensure that their children surmount the examinations hurdle on their way to well-paying government jobs. Cheating has become a national pastime, where everyone including the mandarins at the KNEC to the schools' administrations to parents and students are complicit. However, the punishment is only meted out against the youth of the nation, reminding them that they live at the sufferance of the official government. It is no wonder that many of them find attractive the likes of quasi-religious criminal outfits like the Mungiki or al Shabaab.

It is time that we woke up to the fact that the overhaul of education in Kenya requires more than just re-jigging the 8-4-4 system, but a complete overhaul of how we value human resources in this country. When Mwai Kibaki was seeking re-election in 2007 - indeed when all candidates were seeking the presidency - he promised that his government would create 500,000 jobs annually. That is a promise he has failed and continues to fail to keep. One reason is that i is impossible to assess what skills the youth possess when they do not have passing grades either at Standard Eight or Form Four levels or what skills are needed and in what proportions at the various levels of the national economy. It is sad that the mandarins overseeing the implementation of the Vision 2030 blue-print are yet to advise the nation of this either. Until we do so, the rage that is being expressed by ex-students in Garissa will continue to be a main feature every time the Minister for Education cancels the results of children accused of cheating and other examination offences and the nation will be the poorer for it.